On 2005-12-03 12:56:00, GregFL wrote:
These frightening scare tactics did more to make people have the 'three day miracle' than anything else. In reality, the 20 year in raiford scare was highly unlikely, unless you were sentenced to the seed for shooting someone in an armed robbery.
Anyone?
Well, in a sane world, yeah, it was just an idle threat; a really dirty trick to play on ignorant kids. But in St. Pete and, for a time, in Ft. Lauderdale? It was no threat.
Program friendly judges pulled all sorts of bogus shit on various people. You got arrested in another state, didn't you? I was
extradited from Georgia to Florida for the "crime" of being a runaway. 17 was the default age of emancipation in Georgia and I was about 3 months from my 18th birthday. They tried kidnapping me from my bed, tried getting me arrested on bullshit allegations, then got some program friendly judge in Florida to sign a fucking extradition order. Never mind that they don't bother extraditing car thieves and only rarely go to the trouble for violent criminals. This judge evidently bought in hook, line and sinker to the lie that he was just bending the rules (what we quaintly call "laws") in order to save a kids life.
Crazy fucking times, man. And this is pretty much what Janet Rambo's much vaunted Drug Courts do day in and day out.
Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experimanet, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose. [The Eighteenth Amendment, enacting Prohibition.]
Letter to Senator W.H. Borah
--Herbert Hoover (Feb 28, 1928)